Over the past month I’ve been working on a python project and I ended up learning about python packaging. Using these standard tools is a very useful way to distribute projects since they can be easily built by anyone or converted to standard packages such as .deb or .rpm.

I’ve now re-organized the code in track_msg so that it can be built and installed using standard python tools like pip. Build and install instructions can be found on the project page.

I had initially written track_msg using python’s re module, but after some tests on fairly large logs (~250Mb) I realized that using inline functions like python’s string module was much more efficient the script ran reasonably fast on larger files.

I think there’s still room for improvements but I’m going to move on for now, and see if there are any bugs that I’ll run into during daily use.

A while back I had to do a lot of searching through postfix log files at work. I got tired of having to first, find the original email based on the to and from information, then searching the logs using the various queue id’s as the emails got queued by the mail daemon.

So, I wrote a python script that combined the process and it did the job and saved me a good amount of time. I then got carried away and added color to the output, and got a bit fancy. So I decided to make the script public. It is still not optimal and processing large files ( > 2Gb ) takes longer than I’d like. Hopefully in future iterations I’ll improve the performance.

Last week, twitter released a new version of their iPhone app and with it removed the option to use a custom image uploader. This means the end of the line for my t2f service, and I now have to use the more traditional way of posting from Flickr to twitter.

So this ends development or any improvements to t2f unless I find a new use for it.

In an attempt to learn some of the KDE API and work on a todo list that I like, I’ve written a widget to view a todo.txt file and display it in a plasmoid. The initial code is very basic and even does somethings wrong (I think), but it’s a start. I’m using it daily at work and when I get a chance I’m improving on it.

I’ve made a little page for the t2f project. It’s a photo upload service that can be used with the Twitter app on iOS, and any other apps that allow custom image upload services. I was hoping the android version would support custom services, but it doesn’t and considering they were written by different people it’s no surprise.

It was just an excuse for me to practice on the Google App Engine, and it’s not ready for public use. I’ll have to clean it up a bit so I can at least publish the code.